Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
